Why Women Should Skip Business School

Harvard Business School has been trying to improve the environment for female students, as Jodi Kantor wrote in the Times earlier this month. Women in the school historically have lagged behind their male classmates in academic performance despite entering on equal footing, but in the past two years, H.B.S. succeeded in closing the grade gap. What’s less clear is what impact, if any, the school’s efforts will have on the frat-house culture of its student body, which Kantor reports “many Wall Street-hardened women confided was worse than any trading floor.” Which raises a question for ambitious young businesswomen: Why go to business school at all?

In 2004, during my second year on Wall Street, I considered applying to business school. I was one of many twenty-two-year-olds who landed on Wall Street because, as Michael Lewis put it, I didn’t “actually know anything about anything”—which became painfully clear my first year on the job. I thought an M.B.A. might make me more legitimate. Lehman Brothers, my employer at the time, offered nighttime GMAT classes, and I signed up. One evening, a boss leafed through the practice exams sitting in a corner of my cubicle and asked if I really thought I’d learn more by going to business school than by staying right where I was.

Unlike medical school or law school, business school isn’t a requirement for a business career. Many successful C.E.O.s don’t hold M.B.A.s: Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo; Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com; Ginni Rometty, of I.B.M. On Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, business school is often stigmatized as a booze-addled vacation; Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, famously observed that business-school graduates’ interest in a sector is a leading indicator of a bubble.

Furthermore, among people considering an M.B.A., the average incoming Harvard Business School student needs the degree the least, given the qualifications required to be accepted in the first place. Arguably, it’s the qualities that get a candidate admitted to Harvard in the first place that insure her success after graduation, rather than the degree itself. Meanwhile, an M.B.A. isn’t always worth its steep financial cost. Including tuition, room, and board, a Harvard M.B.A. today costs more than a hundred and eighty thousand dollars—and that’s before lost wages.

But for women, another consideration is at least as important, and maybe more so: lost time.

The uncomfortable truth is that women in business are more likely than men to drop out of the workforce or have their careers interrupted a decade after earning their M.B.A.s, because of family considerations. According to a Harvard study of graduates of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a decade after earning their M.B.A.s, women were twenty-two per cent more likely than men to have experienced at least one career interruption. Thirteen per cent of women weren’t working, compared to one per cent of men. And even if women’s careers weren’t interrupted when they had children, they were certainly affected: the study also found that “M.B.A. mothers seem to actively choose jobs that are family friendly and avoid jobs with long hours and greater career advancement possibilities.”

Given this possibility, isn’t the most important thing for a woman to work as hard as she can and advance as far as possible while she’s still in her twenties and her life is as uncomplicated as it’s going to get? That way, by the time she’s a decade or so along, she’ll have more savings, more job experience, and more bargaining power—all of which translate into more options.

A young woman considering a Harvard M.B.A. might say, “That isn’t me—I’m smart, I’m driven, I’m not going to opt out.” But look at the data. A Vanderbilt study found that mothers who graduate from élite institutions are more likely to opt out than graduates of less selective ones, particularly when those women have M.B.A.s. Another Harvard study found that among Harvard college graduates with professional degrees, women with M.B.A.s have the lowest labor force participation rates. If anything, when a young woman considering a Harvard M.B.A. looks at the choices of her predecessors, she should be even more skeptical of the value of the degree. If time turns out to be scarce, every year counts. Does it really make sense to spend two years of precious time earning a nonessential degree in a hostile environment?

Consider other uses of those two years. Instead of relying on an M.B.A. to boost her skill set, a woman could teach herself a hard skill like programming or Chinese, or she could start her own business. If she’s working in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, or another industry where many are promoted without M.B.A.s, she could stay put and continue to rise. And if she doesn’t have a better use for those two years now but thinks she might later on, why not preserve that option?

That’s what happened to me. The question of whether to go to business school became less urgent after my third year on Wall Street, when, like many in my cohort, I was promoted to the same position at which M.B.A. graduates entered. I still thought about getting an M.B.A.—and starting my own business, and learning Chinese—because Wall Street wasn’t quite right for me. I wanted to redirect my career, but I wasn’t sure business school was the right answer. In the end, I never applied. What I couldn’t have predicted then was that, in 2009, after seven years on Wall Street, I would leave finance to write a novel. If I’d decided to get my M.B.A., I would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer and two years behind on my career track; I could not have taken the chance.

Of course, there are some women for whom business school will still be the right choice because it’s the best use of two years—a woman who wants to transition from an N.G.O. to finance, for example. But it shouldn’t be seen as an obvious choice for everyone. Before hurrying to get her M.B.A., a woman should ask herself whether her time is best spent listening to male classmates “openly ruminate on whom they would ‘kill, sleep with or marry,’ ” as Kantor put it, and taking courses in which only eight per cent of case studies feature a female protagonist. If she isn’t sure, perhaps she should take her business elsewhere.